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- "Animal liberation" redirects here; for other uses, see Animal liberation (disambiguation). For the book by Peter Singer, see Animal Liberation (book).
Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings. Animal rights advocates approach the issue from different philosophical positions, but they agree that animals should no longer be regarded as property, or used as food, clothing, research subjects, or entertainment, but should instead be viewed as legal persons and members of the moral community.
The idea of awarding rights to animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School.
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The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races, -- race living at the expense of race.
Encyclopedia
- "Animal liberation" redirects here; for other uses, see Animal liberation (disambiguation). For the book by Peter Singer, see Animal Liberation (book).
Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings. Animal rights advocates approach the issue from different philosophical positions, but they agree that animals should no longer be regarded as property, or used as food, clothing, research subjects, or entertainment, but should instead be viewed as legal persons and members of the moral community.
The idea of awarding rights to animals has the support of legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School. Steven Wise, also of Harvard Law School, argues that the first serious judicial challenges to what he calls the "legal thinghood" of animals may only be a few years away, while Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby believes that the idea of animal rights has reached the stage the gay rights movement was at 25 years ago. Animal law is now taught in 100 out of 180 law schools in the United States, and in eight law schools in Canada. The concept of animal rights is routinely covered in universities as part of applied ethics or philosophy courses; Robert Garner of the University of Leicester calls it the "new morality." In June 2008, Spain became the first country to introduce animal rights, when a cross-party parliamentary committee recommended that rights be extended to the great apes, in accordance with Peter Singer's Great Ape Project.
Critics argue that animals are unable to enter into a social contract or make moral choices, and therefore cannot be regarded as possessors of rights, a position summed up by the philosopher Roger Scruton, who writes that only human beings have duties and that "[the] corollary is inescapable: we alone have rights." An argument running parallel to this is that there is nothing inherently wrong with using animals as resources so long as they do not suffer unnecessarily, a view known as the animal welfare position. There has also been criticism, including from within the animal rights movement, of certain forms of animal rights activism, in particular the destruction of fur farms and animal laboratories by the Animal Liberation Front.
Development of the idea
Moral status of animals in the ancient world
The idea that the use of animals by human beings—for food, clothing, entertainment, and as research subjects—is morally acceptable springs mainly from two sources. First, there is the idea of a divine hierarchy based on the theological concept of "dominion," from Genesis (1:20-28), where Adam is given "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Although the concept of dominion need not entail property rights, it has, over the centuries, been interpreted to imply some form of ownership.
Second, is the idea that animals are inferior, because they lack rationality or language, and as such are worthy of less consideration than human beings, or even none. Springing from this is the idea that individual animals have no separate moral identity. A pig is simply an example of the class of pigs, and it is to the class, not to the individual, that human responsibility or stewardship applies. This leads to the argument that the use of individual animals is acceptable so long as, for example, the species is not threatened with extinction.
The 21st-century debate about these ideas can be traced back to the earliest philosophers and theologians.
17th century: Animals as automata
1641: Descartes
The year 1641 was significant for the idea of animal rights. The great influence of the century was the French philosopher, René Descartes (1596–1650), whose Meditations was published that year, and whose ideas about animals informed attitudes well into the 21st century.
Writing during the "scientific revolution" versus medieval and Renaissance thinking — a revolution of which he was one of the chief architects — Descartes proposed a mechanistic theory of the universe, the aim of which was to show that the world could be mapped out without having to allude to subjective experience. The senses deceive, he wrote in the First Meditation in 1641, and "it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once."
His mechanistic approach was extended to the issue of animal consciousness. Mind, for Descartes, was a thing apart from the physical universe, a separate substance, linking human beings to the mind of God. The non-human, on the other hand, are nothing but complex automata, with no souls, minds, or reason. They can see, hear and touch, but they are not, in any sense, conscious, and are unable to suffer or even to feel pain.
In the Discourse, published in 1637, Descartes wrote that the ability to reason and use language involve being able to respond in complex ways to "all the contingencies of life," something that animals clearly cannot do. He argued from this that any sounds animals make do not constitute language, but are simply automatic responses to external stimuli.
1635, 1641, 1654: First known laws protecting animals
Richard Ryder writes that the first known legislation against animal cruelty in the English-speaking world was passed in Ireland in 1635. It prohibited pulling wool off sheep, and the attaching of ploughs to horses' tails, referring to "the cruelty used to beasts," which Ryde writes is probably the earliest reference to this concept in the English language.
In 1641, the year Descartes' Meditations was published, the first legal code to protect domestic animals in North America was passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's constitution was based on The Body of Liberties, written by the Reverend Nathaniel Ward (1578–1652), a lawyer, Puritan clergyman, and Cambridge graduate, originally from Suffolk, England. Ward listed the "rites" the Colony's general court later endorsed, including rite number 92: "No man shall exercise any Tirrany or Crueltie toward any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man's use." Historian Roderick Nash writes that, at the height of Descartes' influence in Europe, it is significant that the early New Englanders created a law that implied animals were not unfeeling automata.
The Puritans passed animal protection legislation in England too. Katheen Kete of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut writes that animal welfare laws were passed in 1654 as part of the ordinances of the Protectorate — the government under Oliver Cromwell, which lasted 1653–1659 — during the English Civil War. Cromwell disliked blood sports, particularly cockfighting, cock throwing, dog fighting, as well as bull baiting and bull running, both said to tenderize the meat. These could frequently be seen in towns, villages, in fairgrounds, and became associated for the Puritans with idleness, drunkenness, and gambling. Kete writes that the Puritans interpreted the dominion of man over animals in the Book of Genesis to mean responsible stewardship, rather than ownership. The opposition to blood sports became part of what was seen as Puritan interference in people's lives, which became a leitmotif of resistance to them, Kete writes, and the animal protection laws were overturned during the Restoration, when Charles II was returned to the throne in 1660. Bull baiting remained lawful in England for another 162 years, until it was outlawed in 1822.
1693: Locke
Against Descartes, the British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693, that animals do have feelings, and that unnecessary cruelty toward them is morally wrong, but — echoing Thomas Aquinas — the right not to be so harmed adhered either to the animal's owner, or to the person who was being harmed by being cruel, not to the animal itself. Discussing the importance of preventing children from tormenting animals, he wrote: "For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men."
18th century: The centrality of sentience, not reason
1754: Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) argued in Discourse on Inequality in 1754 that animals should be part of natural law, not because they are rational, but because they are sentient:
1785: Kant
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), following Augustine, Aquinas, and Locke, opposed the idea that human beings have duties toward non-humans. For Kant, cruelty to animals was wrong solely on the grounds that it was bad for humankind. He argued in 1785 that human beings have duties only toward other human beings, and that "cruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened."
1789: Bentham
Four years later, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), although deeply opposed to the concept of natural rights, argued with Rousseau that it was the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, that should be the benchmark of how we treat other beings. If rationality were the criterion, many human beings, including babies and disabled people, would also have to be treated as though they were things. He wrote in 1789, just as slaves were being freed by the French, but were still held captive in the British dominions:
1792: Thomas Taylor
Despite Rousseau and Bentham, the idea that animals did or ought to have rights remained ridiculous. When Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), the British feminist writer, published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Thomas Taylor (1758—1835), a Cambridge philosopher, responded with an anonymous tract called Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, intended as a reductio ad absurdum. Taylor took Wollstonecraft's arguments, and those of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1790), and showed that they applied equally to animals, leading to the conclusion that animals have "intrinsic and real dignity and worth," a conclusion absurd enough, in his view, to discredit Wollstonecraft's and Paine's positions entirely.
19th century: Emergence of jus animalium
Legislation
The 19th century saw an explosion of interest in animal protection, particularly in England. Debbie Legge and Simon Brooman of Liverpool John Moores University write that the educated classes became concerned about attitudes toward the old, the needy, children, and the insane, and that this concern was extended to non-humans. Before the 19th century, there had been prosecutions for poor treatment of animals, but only because of the damage to the animal as property. In 1793, for example, John Cornish was found not guilty of maiming a horse after pulling its tongue out, the judge ruling that he could be found guilty only if there was evidence of malice toward the owner.
From 1800 onwards, there were several attempts in England to introduce animal welfare or rights legislation. The first was a bill in 1800 against bull baiting, introduced by Sir William Pulteney, and opposed by the Secretary of War, William Windham, on the grounds that it was anti-working class. Another attempt was made in 1802 by William Wilberforce, again opposed by Windham, who said that bulls enjoyed being baited. In 1811, Lord Erskine introduced a bill to protect cattle and horses from malicious wounding, wanton cruelty, and beating, this one opposed by Windham because it would prejudice property rights. Judge Edward Abbott Parry writes that the House of Lords found the proposal so sentimental that they drowned Erskine out with cat calls and cock crowing.
1822: Martin's Act
In 1821, the Treatment of Horses bill was introduced by Colonel Richard Martin, MP for Galway in Ireland, but it was lost among laughter in the House of Commons that the next thing would be rights for asses, dogs, and cats.
Martin — nicknamed "Humanity Dick" by George IV — finally succeeded in 1822 with his Ill Treatment of Horses and Cattle Bill, or "Martin's Act", as it became known, the world's first major piece of animal protection legislation. It was given royal assent on June 22 that year as An Act to prevent the cruel and improper Treatment of Cattle, and made it an offence, punishable by fines up to five pounds or two months imprisonment, to "beat, abuse, or ill-treat any horse, mare, gelding, mule, ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle." Any citizen was entitled to bring charges under the Act.
Legge and Brooman argue that the success of the Bill lay in the personality of "Humanity Dick," who was able to shrug off the ridicule from the House of Commons, and whose own sense of humour managed to capture its attention. It was Martin himself who brought the first prosecution under the Act, when he had Bill Burns, a costermonger — a street seller of fruit — arrested for beating a donkey. Seeing in court that the magistrates seemed bored and didn't much care about the donkey, he sent for it, parading its injuries before a reportedly astonished court. Burns was fined, becoming the first person in the world known to have been convicted of animal cruelty. Newspapers and music halls were full of jokes about the "Trial of Bill Burns," as it became known, and how Martin had relied on the testimony of a donkey, giving Martin's Act some welcome publicity. The trial became the subject of a painting (right), which hangs in the headquarters of the RSPCA in London.
Other countries followed suit in passing legislation or making decisions that favoured animals. In 1882, the courts in New York ruled that wanton cruelty to animals was a misdemeanor at common law. In France in 1850, succeeded in having the Loi Grammont passed, outlawing cruelty against domestic animals, and leading to years of arguments about whether bulls could be classed as domestic in order to ban bullfighting. The state of Washington followed in 1859, New York in 1866, California in 1868, Florida in 1889. In England, a series of amendments extended the reach of the 1822 Act, which became the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835, outlawing cockfighting, baiting, and dog fighting, followed by another amendment in 1849, and again in 1876.
1824: Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
It soon became clear to Richard Martin that magistrates were not taking the Martin Act seriously, and that it was not being reliably enforced. A number of MPs decided to form a society with a view to bringing prosecutions under the Act. A meeting was arranged in Old Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane — a London café frequented by artists and actors — by the Reverend Arthur Broome, a Balliol man originally from Devonshire, who had recently become the vicar of Bromley-by-Bow.
treats a bear as a neighbor (ca. 1800)]]
The men met on June 16, 1824, and included a number of MPs: Richard Martin, Sir James Mackintosh, Sir Thomas Buxton, William Wilberforce, and Sir James Graham, who had been an MP, and who became one again in 1826. They decided to form a "Society instituted for the purpose of preventing cruelty to animals," or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as it became known. It determined to send men to inspect the Smithfield Market in the City, where livestock had been sold since the 10th century, as well as slaughterhouses, and the practices of coachmen toward their horses.
The Society became the Royal Society in 1840, when it was granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria, herself strongly opposed to vivisection.
An early example of direct action
Noel Molland writes that, in 1824, Catherine Smithies, an anti-slavery activist, set up an SPCA youth wing called the Bands of Mercy. It was a children's club modeled on the Temperance Society's Bands of Hope, which were intended to encourage children to campaign against drinking and gambling. The Bands of Mercy were similarly meant to encourage a love of animals.
Molland writes that some of its members responded with more enthusiasm than Smithies intended, and became known for engaging in direct action against hunters by sabotaging their rifles, although Kim Stallwood of the Animal Rights Network writes he has often heard these stories but has never been able to find solid evidence to support them.
Whether the story is true or apocryphal, the idea of the youth group was revived by Ronnie Lee in 1972, when he and Cliff Goodman set up the Band of Mercy as a militant, anti-hunting guerrilla group, which slashed hunters' vehicles' tires and smashed their windows. In 1976, some of the same activists, sensing that the Band of Mercy name sounded too accommodating, founded the Animal Liberation Front.
1866: American SPCA
The first animal protection group in the United States was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), founded by Henry Bergh in April 1866. Bergh had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to a diplomatic post in Russia, and had been disturbed by the treatment of animals there. He consulted with the president of the RSPCA in London, the Earl of Harrowby, and returned to the U.S. to speak out against bullfights, cockfights, and the beating of horses. He created a "Declaration of the Rights of Animals," and in 1866, persuaded the New York state legislature to pass anti-cruelty legislation and to grant the ASPCA the authority to enforce it.
Other groups
The remainder of the century saw the creation of many animal protection groups. In 1875, the British feminist Frances Power Cobbe founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, the world's first organization opposed to animal research, which became the National Anti-Vivisection Society. In 1898, she set up the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, with which she campaigned against the use of dogs in research, coming close to success with the 1919 Dogs (Protection) Bill, which almost became law.
1824: Development of the concept of animal rights
The period saw the first extended interest in the idea that non-humans might have natural rights, or ought to have legal ones. In 1824, Lewis Gompertz, one of the men who attended the first meeting of the SPCA in June that year, published Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, in which he argued that every living creature, human and non-human, has more right to the use of its own body than anyone else has to use it, and that our duty to promote happiness applies equally to all beings.
In 1879, Edward Nicholson argued in Rights of an Animal that animals have the same natural right to life and liberty that human beings do, arguing strongly against Descartes' mechanistic view, or what he called the "Neo-Cartesian snake," that they lack consciousness. Other writers of the time who explored whether animals might have natural rights were John Lewis, Edward Evans, and J. Howard Moore.
In 1894, Henry Salt, a former master at Eton who had set up the Humanitarian League to lobby for a ban on hunting the year before, created what Keith Tester of the University of Portsmouth has called an "epistemological break," in Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress.
Salt wrote that the object of his essay was to "set the principle of animals' rights on a consistent and intelligible footing, [and] to show that this principle underlies the various efforts of humanitarian reformers ...," using the definition of "right" proposed by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, namely: "Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal liberty of any other man ... Whoever admits that each man must have a certain restricted freedom, asserts that it is right he should have this restricted freedom.... And hence the several particular freedoms deducible may fitly be called, as they commonly are called, his rights."
Concessions to the demands for jus animalium have been made grudgingly to date, he writes, with an eye on the interests of animals qua property, rather than as rights bearers:
He argued that there is no point in claiming rights for animals if we subordinate those rights to human desire, and took issue with the idea that the life of a human being might have more moral worth or purpose. "[The] notion of the life of an animal having 'no moral purpose,' belongs to a class of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian thought of the present day — it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at variance with our best instincts, at variance with our best science, and absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full realization of animals' rights. If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a "great gulf" fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood."
1839: Schopenhauer
The development in England of the concept of animal rights was strongly supported by the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). He wrote that Europeans were "awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man." He applauded the animal protection movement in England — "To the honor, then, of the English be it said that they are the first people who have, in downright earnest, extended the protecting arm of the law to animals." — and argued against the dominant Kantian idea that animal cruelty is wrong only insofar as it brutalizes human beings:
Schopenhauer's views on animal rights stopped short of advocating vegetarianism, arguing that, so long as an animal's death was quick, men would suffer more by not eating meat than animals would suffer by being eaten. He wrote in The Basis of Morality: "It is asserted that beasts have no rights ... that 'there are no duties to be fulfilled towards animals.' Such a view is one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West, whose source is Judaism." A few passages later, he called the idea that animals exist for human benefit a "Jewish stence."
Late 1890s: Opposition to anthropomorphism
Richard Ryder writes that, in his view, attitudes toward animals began to harden in the late 1890s, when scientists embraced the idea that what they saw as anthropomorphism — the attribution of human qualities to non-humans — was unscientific. Animals had to be approached as physiological entities only, as Ivan Pavlov wrote in 1927, "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as to the existence of any possible subjective states." This stance harkened back to the position of Descartes in the 17th century that non-humans were purely mechanical, like clocks, with no rationality and perhaps even with no consciousness.
Early 20th century: Tierschutzgesetz; industrialization of animal use
1933: Tierschutzgesetz
On coming to power in January 1933, the Nazis passed the most comprehensive set of animal protection laws in Europe. Kathleen Kete of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut writes that it was the first known attempt by a government to break the species barrier, the traditional binary of humans and animals. Humans as a species lost their sacrosanct status, with Aryans at the top of the hierarchy, followed by wolves, eagles, and pigs, and Jews languishing with rats at the bottom. Kete writes that it was the worst possible answer to the question of what our relationship with other species ought to be.
On November 24, 1933, the Tierschutzgesetz, or animal protection law, was introduced, with Adolf Hitler announcing an end to animal cruelty: "Im neuen Reich darf es keine Tierquälerei mehr geben." ("In the new Reich, no more animal cruelty will be allowed.") It was followed on July 3, 1934 by the Reichsjagdsgesetz, prohibiting hunting; on July 1, 1935, by the Naturschutzgesetz, a comprehensive piece of environmental legislation; on November 13, 1937, by a law regulating animal transport by car; and on September 8, 1938, by a similar one dealing with animals on trains. The least painful way to shoe a horse was prescribed, as was the correct way to cook a lobster to prevent them from being boiled alive. Several senior Nazis, including Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, adopted some form of vegetarianism, though by most accounts not strictly, with Hitler allowing himself the occasional dish of meat. Himmler also mandated vegetarianism for senior SS officers.
Shortly before the Tierschutzgesetz was introduced, vivisection was first banned, then restricted. Animal research was viewed as part of "Jewish science," and "internationalist" medicine, indicating a mechanistic mind that saw nature as something to be dominated, rather than respected. Hermann Göring first announced a ban on August 16, 1933, following Hitler's wishes, but Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Morrel, reportedly persuaded him that this was not in the interests of German research, and in particular defence research. The ban was therefore revised three weeks later, on September 5, 1933, when eight conditions were announced under which animal tests could be conducted, with a view to reducing pain and unnecessary experiments. Primates, horses, dogs, and cats were given special protection, and licences to conduct vivisection were to be given to institutions, not to individuals. The removal of the ban was justified with the announcement: "It is a law of every community that, when necessary, single individuals are sacrificed in the interests of the entire body."
Medical experiments were later conducted on Jews and Romani children in camps, particularly in Auschwitz by Dr. Josef Mengele, and on others regarded as inferior, including prisoners-of-war. Because the human subjects were often in such poor health, researchers feared that the results of the experiments were unreliable, and so human experiments would be repeated on animals. Dr Hans Nachtheim, for example, induced epilepsy on human adults and children without their consent by injecting them with cardiazol, then repeated the experiments on rabbits to check the results.
Post 1945: Increase in animal use
Despite the profileration of animal protection legislation, animals had no legal rights. Debbie Legge writes that existing legislation was very much tied to the idea of human interests, whether protecting human sensibilities by outlawing cruelty, or protecting property rights by making sure animals were not damaged. The over-exploitation of fishing stocks, for example, is viewed as harming the environment for people; the hunting of animals to extinction means that human beings in future will derive no enjoyment from them; poaching results in financial loss to the owner, and so on.
Notwithstanding the interest in animal welfare of the previous century, the situation for animals arguably deteriorated in the 20th century, particularly after the Second World War. This was in part because of the increase in the numbers used in animal research — 300 in the UK in 1875, 19,084 in 1903, and 2.8 million in 2005 (50–100 million worldwide) and an modern annual estimated range of 10 million to upwards of 100 million in the U.S. — but mostly because of the industrialization of farming, which saw billions of animals raised and killed for food each year on a scale not possible before the war.
Late 20th century: Emergence of an animal rights movement
1960s: Formation of the Oxford group and the first wave of writers
A small group of intellectuals, particularly at Oxford University — now known as the Oxford Group — began to view the increasing use of animals as unacceptable exploitation. In 1964, Ruth Harrison published Animal Machines, a critique of factory farming, which proved influential. Psychologist Richard D. Ryder, who became a member of the Oxford Group, cites a 1965 Sunday Times article by novelist Brigid Brophy, called "The Rights of Animals," as having encouraged his own interest. He writes that it was the first time a major newspaper had devoted so much space to the issue. Robert Garner of the University of Leicester writes that Harrison's and Brophy's articles led to an explosion of interest in the relationship between humans and non-humans, or what Garner calls the "new morality."
Brophy wrote:
Ryder had been disturbed by incidents he had witnessed as a researcher in animal laboratories in the UK and U.S., and in what he calls a "spontaneous eruption of thought and indignation," he wrote letters to the editor of The Daily Telegraph about the issue, which were published on April 7, May 3, and May 20, 1969.
Brophy read them, and put Ryder in touch with Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris, who were working on a book of moral philosophy about the treatment of animals. Ryder subsequently became a contributor to their highly influential Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1971), as did Harrison and Brophy. Rosalind Godlovitch's essay "Animal and Morals" was published in the same year.
1970: Coining the term "speciesism"
In 1970, Ryder coined the phrase "speciesism" in a privately printed pamphlet — having first thought of it in the bath — to describe the assignment of value to the interests of beings on the basis of their membership of a particular species. Peter Singer used the term in Animal Liberation in 1975, and it stuck within the animal rights movement, becoming an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989.
1975: Publication of Animal Liberation
It was in a review of Animals, Men and Morals for the The New York Review of Books on April 5, 1973, that the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, first put forward his arguments in favour of animal liberation, which have become pivotal within the movement. He based his arguments on the principle of utilitarianism, the view, broadly speaking, that an act is right insofar as it leads to the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," a phrase first used in 1776 by Jeremy Bentham in A Fragment on Government. He drew an explicit comparison between the liberation of women and the liberation of animals.
In 1970, over lunch in Oxford with fellow student Richard Keshen, who was a vegetarian, Singer first came to believe that, by eating animals, he was engaging in the oppression of other species by his own. Keshen introduced Singer to the Godlovitches, and Singer and Roslind Godlovitch spent hours together refining their views. Singer's review of the Godlovitches' book evolved into Animal Liberation, published in 1975, now widely regarded as the "bible" of the modern animal rights movement.
Although he regards himself as an animal rights advocate, Singer uses the term "right" as "shorthand for the kind of protection that we give to all members of our species." There is no rights theory in his work. He rejects the idea that humans or non-humans have natural or moral rights, and proposes instead the equal consideration of interests, arguing that there are no logical, moral, or biological grounds to suppose that a violation of the basic interests of a human being — for example, the interest in not suffering — is different in any morally significant way from a violation of the basic interests of a non-human. Singer's position is that of the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), who wrote: "The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other."
The publication of Animal Liberation — in 1975 in the U.S. and 1976 in the UK — triggered a groundswell of scholarly interest in animal rights. Tom Regan wrote in 2001 that philosophers had written more about animal rights in the previous 20 years than in the 2,000 years before that. Robert Garner writes that Charles Magel's extensive bibliography of the literature, Keyguide to Information Sources in Animal Rights (1989), contains 10 pages of philosophical material on animals up to 1970, but 13 pages between 1970 and 1989.
1976: Founding of the Animal Liberation Front
In parallel with the Oxford Group, grassroots activists were also developing ideas about animal rights. A British law student, Ronnie Lee, formed an anti-hunting activist group in Luton in 1971, later calling it the Band of Mercy after a 19th-century RSPCA youth group. The Band attacked hunters' vehicles by slashing tires and breaking windows, calling their brand of activism "active compassion." In November 1973, they engaged in their first act of arson when they set fire to a Hoechst Pharamaceuticals research laboratory near Milton Keynes. The Band claimed responsibility, identifying itself to the press as a "nonviolent guerilla organization dedicated to the liberation of animals from all forms of cruelty and persecution at the hands of mankind."
In August 1974, Lee and another activist were sentenced to three years in prison. They were paroled after 12 months, with Lee emerging more militant than ever. In 1976, he brought together the remaining Band of Mercy activists, with some fresh faces, 30 activists in all, in order to start a new movement. He called it the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a name he hoped would come to "haunt" those who used animals.
The ALF is now active in 38 countries, operating as a leaderless resistance, with covert cells acting on a need to know basis, often learning of each other's existence only when acts of "liberation" are claimed. Activists see themselves as a modern Underground Railroad, the network that helped slaves escape from the U.S. to Canada, passing animals from ALF cells, who have removed them from farms and laboratories, to sympathetic veterinarians to safe houses and finally to sanctuaries. Controversially, some activists also engage in sabotage and arson, as well as threats and intimidation, acts that have lost the movement a great deal of sympathy in mainstream public opinion.
The decentralized model of activism is intensely frustrating for law enforcement organizations, who find the cells and networks difficult to infiltrate, because they tend to be organized around known friends. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security indicated how seriously it takes the ALF when it included them in a list of domestic terrorist threats.
The tactics of some of the more determined ALF activists are anathema to many animal rights advocates, such as Singer, who regard the animal rights movement as something that should occupy the moral high ground, an impossible claim to sustain when others are bombing buildings and risking lives in the name of the same idea.
ALF activists respond to the criticism with the argument that, as Ingrid Newkirk of PETA puts it, "Thinkers may prepare revolutions, but bandits must carry them out."
Early 21st century: First animals to be granted legal rights
Spain becomes the first to grant rights to non-human primates
On June 25, 2008, Spain became the first country to extend rights to the great apes. An all-party parliamentary group advised the government to write legislation giving chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans the right to life, to liberty, and the right not to be used in experiments, in accordance with Peter Singer's Great Ape Project (GAP). Pedro Pozas of GAP in Spain called it "a historic day in the struggle for animal rights ... which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity."
The New York Times reported that the proposed legislation will make it illegal to kill apes, except in self-defense. Torture, including medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, such as for circuses or films, will be outlawed.
Main philosophical approaches
Overview
There are two main philosophical approaches to the issue of animal rights: a utilitarian approach and a rights-based one. The former is exemplifed by Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, and the latter by Tom Regan, professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University.
Their differences reflect a distinction philosophers draw between ethical theories that judge the rightness of an act by its consequences (called consequentialism, teleological ethics, or utilitarianism, which is Singer's position), and those who judge acts to be right or wrong in themselves, almost regardless of consequences (called deontological ethics, of which Regan is an adherent). A consequentialist might argue, for example, that lying is wrong if the lie will make someone unhappy. A deontologist would argue that lying is wrong in principle.
Within the animal rights debate, Singer does not believe there are such things as natural rights and that animals have them, although he uses the language of rights as shorthand for how we ought to treat individuals. Instead, he argues that, when we weigh the consequences of an act in order to judge whether it is right or wrong, the interests of animals, primarily their interest in avoiding suffering, ought to be given equal consideration to the similar interests of human beings. That is, where the suffering of one individual, human or non-human, is equivalent to that of any other, there is no moral reason to award more weight to either one of them.
Regan's philosophy, on the other hand, is not driven by the weighing of consequences. He believes that animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," who have moral rights for that reason, and that moral rights ought not to be ignored.
Utilitarian approach: Peter Singer
Equal consideration of interests
Singer is an act utilitarian, or more specifically a preference utilitarian, meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by its consequences, and specifically by the extent to which it satisfies the preferences of those affected, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. (There are other forms of utilitarianism, such as rule utilitarianism, which judges the rightness of an act according to the usual consequences of whichever moral rule the act is an instance of.)
Singer's position is that there are no moral grounds for failing to give equal consideration to the interests of human and non-humans. His principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment, but equal consideration of interests. A mouse and a man both have an interest in not being kicked down the street, because both would suffer if so kicked, and there are no moral or logical grounds, Singer argues, for failing to accord their interests in not being kicked equal weight. Singer quotes the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick: "The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other." This reflects Jeremy Bentham's position: "[E]ach to count for one, and none for more than one."
Unlike the position of a man or a mouse, a stone would not suffer if kicked down the street, and therefore has no interest in avoiding it. Interests, Singer argues, are predicated on the ability to suffer, and nothing more, and once it is established that a being has interests, those interests must be given equal consideration. The issue of the extent to which animals can suffer is therefore key.
Animal suffering
Singer writes that commentators on all sides of the debate now accept that animals suffer and feel pain, although it was not always so. Bernard Rollin, a philosopher and professor of animal sciences, writes that Descartes' influence continued to be felt until the 1980s. Veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were taught to ignore pain, he writes, and at least one major veterinary hospital in the 1960s did not stock narcotic analgesics for animal pain control. In his interactions with scientists, he was often asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" evidence that they could feel pain.
Singer writes that scientific publications have made it clear over the last two decades that the majority of researchers do believe animals suffer and feel pain, though it continues to be argued that their suffering may be reduced by an inability to experience the same dread of anticipation as human beings, or to remember the suffering as vividly. In the most recent edition of Animal Liberation, Singer cites research indicating that animal impulses, emotions, and feelings are located in the diencephalon, pointing out that this region is well developed in mammals and birds. Singer also relies on the work of Richard Sarjeant to support his position. Sarjeant pointed out that non-human animals possess anatomical complexity of the cerebral cortex and neuroanatomy that is nearly identical to that of the human nervous system, arguing that, "[e]very particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own. To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity; it can easily be shown that many of their senses are far more acute than ours."
The problem of animal suffering, and animal consciousness in general, arises primarily because animals have no language, leading scientists to argue that it is impossible to know when an animal is suffering. This situation may change as increasing numbers of chimps are taught sign language, although skeptics question whether their use of it portrays real understanding. Singer writes that, following the argument that language is needed to communicate pain, it would often be impossible to know when human beings are in pain. All we can do is observe pain behavior, he writes, and make a calculated guess based on it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein argued, if someone is screaming, clutching a part of their body, moaning quietly, or apparently unable to function, especially when followed by an event that we believe would cause pain in ourselves, that is in large measure what it means to be in pain. Singer argues that there is no reason to suppose animal pain behavior would have a different meaning.
Equality a prescription, not a fact
Singer argues that equality between human beings is not based on anything factual, but is simply a prescription. Human beings do, in fact, differ in many ways. If the equality of the sexes were based on the idea, for example, that men and women are in principle capable of being equally intelligent, but this was later found to be false, it would mean we would have to abandon the practice of equal consideration. But in fact, equality of consideration is based on a prescription, not a description. It is, Singer writes, a moral idea, not an assertion of fact.
He quotes President Thomas Jefferson, the principal author in 1776 of the American Declaration of Independence: "Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property or persons of others."
Criticism of Singer's Approach
Singer’s approach has suffered criticism due to its philosophical foundation, the doctrine of utilitarianism. Julian H. Franklin argues that utilitarianism is flawed because, under that doctrine, killing is not evil as long as it is painless, if the killing sets no bad example, and if no person who cared for the deceased suffers because of it. Franklin also argues that Utilitarianism is flawed because it requires a calculation of the aggregate well-being of a group, rather than focusing on individual happiness. This, Franklin argues, would permit the infanticide of one sickly child permitting he was replaced by a healthy one. Furthermore, problems arise with the calculation and comparison of inter-individual experiences of pleasure and pain (which are subjective and unique to the individual). Utilitarianism cannot, for example, rule out certain kinds of animal experimentation nor the painless killing of animals for the purpose of eating them. Thus, according to Franklin, Utilitarianism fails to provide clear justification for non-human animal rights.
Rights-based approach: Tom Regan
Tom Regan argues in The Case for Animal Rights and Empty Cages that non-human animals are what he calls "subjects-of-a-life," and as such are bearers of rights. He argues that, because the moral rights of humans are based on their possession of certain cognitive abilities, and because these abilities are also possessed by at least some non-human animals, such animals must have the same moral rights as humans. Although only humans act as moral agents, both marginal-case humans, such as infants, and at least some non-humans must have the status of "moral patients." Moral patients are unable to formulate moral principles, and as such are unable to do right or wrong, even though what they do may be beneficial or harmful. Only moral agents are able to engage in moral action.
Animals for Regan have "inherent value" as subjects-of-a-life, and cannot be regarded as a means to an end. This is also called the "direct duty" view. His theory does not extend to all sentient animals but only to those that can be regarded as subjects-of-a-life. He argues that all normal mammals of at least one year of age would qualify in this regard.
Whereas Singer is primarily concerned with improving the treatment of animals and accepts that, in some hypothetical scenarios, individual animals might be used legitimately to further human or non-human ends, Regan believes we ought to treat non-human animals as we would human beings. He applies the strict Kantian ideal (which Kant himself applied only to human beings) that they ought never to be sacrificed as a means to an end, and must be treated as ends in themselves.
Critics
Carl Cohen
Critics such as Carl Cohen, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan Medical School, oppose the granting of personhood to animals, arguing that rights holders must be able to distinguish between their own interests and what is right. "The holders of rights must have the capacity to comprehend rules of duty governing all, including themselves. In applying such rules, [they] ... must recognize possible conflicts between what is in their own interest and what is just. Only in a community of beings capable of self-restricting moral judgments can the concept of a right be correctly invoked."
Cohen rejects Singer's argument that, since a brain-damaged human being could not make moral judgments, moral judgments cannot be used as the distinguishing characteristic for determining who is awarded rights. Cohen writes that the test for moral judgment "is not a test to be administered to humans one by one," but should be applied to the capacity of members of the species in general.
Posner–Singer debate
A debate between Singer and Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is listed online. In it, Posner first argues that, instead of starting his argument with the idea that consideration of pain for all animals is equal, his moral intuition tells him that humans prefer their own. If a dog threatened a human infant, and if it required causing more pain to the dog to get it to stop than the dog would have caused to the infant, then we, as human beings, favour the child. It would be "monstrous to spare the dog," Posner argues.
Singer challenges Posner's moral intuition by arguing that formerly unequal rights for gays, women, and those of different races were justified using the same set of intuitions. Singer fails to explain why a dog should not be stopped from attacking the child. Posner replies that equality in civil rights did not occur because of ethical arguments, but because facts mounted that there were no morally significant differences between humans based on race, sex, or sexual orientation that would support inequality. If and when similar facts are determined about the differences, or lack thereof, between humans and animals, the differences in rights will erode. But facts will drive equality, not ethical arguments that run contrary to instinct, he argues. Posner calls his approach "soft utilitarian," in contrast to Singer's "hard utilitarian." He argues:
Roger Scruton
The British philosopher Roger Scruton argues that rights imply obligations. Every legal privilege, he writes, imposes a burden on the one who does not possess that privilege: that is, "your right may be my duty." Scruton therefore regards the emergence of the animal rights movement as "the strangest cultural shift within the liberal worldview," because the idea of rights and responsibilities are, he argues, distinctive to the human condition, and it makes no sense to spread them beyond our own species.
He accuses animal rights advocates of "pre-scientific" anthropomorphism, attributing traits to animals that are, he says, Beatrix Potter-like, where "only man is vile." It is within this fiction that the appeal of animal rights lies, he argues. The world of animals is non-judgmental, filled with dogs who return our affection almost no matter what we do to them, and cats who pretend to be affectionate when, in fact, they care only about themselves. It is, he argues, a fantasy, a world of escape.
See also
Further reading
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