Are Human Rights Human? New Perspectives on Animal Rights
by Paola Cavalieri, Logos – a journal of modern society & culture
The history of what we call moral progress can for the most part be seen as the history of the substitution of hierarchical visions with presumptions in favor of equality. The recent irruption into the social scene of the animal question is part of this ongoing process–a process that is usually characterized by a direct challenge to the cultural status quo. In fact, in the last few decades, nonhuman animals have been the center of a lively philosophical debate, and many voices have been raised against our current treatment of the members of species other than our own.
We routinely use nonhuman animals as mere commodities–we kill them for food, we use them in work and entertainment, we employ them as tools for research of all kinds. In short, we treat them in ways in which we would deem it profoundly unethical to treat human beings. Is this position morally defensible? And, if so, on which grounds? Since behind the present divergence in standards lies a deep-rooted philosophical tradition aiming at the exclusion of nonhuman beings from the protected sphere of ethics, it may be worth considering briefly how we got where we are.
Immanuel Kant writes that “so far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as means to an end. That end is man. . . . Our duties towards animals are merely indirect duties towards humanity.”
In the idea that nonhumans are nothing but means one can perceive echoes of Aristotle: “the other animals [exist] for the good of man, the domestic species both for his service and for his food, and . . . most of the wild ones for the sake of his food and of his supplies of other kinds.” And the thesis of indirect duties betrays a reminiscence of Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the subject of biblical injunctions against cruelty to nonhumans: “this is . . . to remove man’s thoughts from being cruel to other men, and lest through being cruel to animals one become cruel to human beings.”
Though other views appeared on the philosophical scene – consider for example the Cartesian idea that animals are mere natural automata with which we can do entirely as we wish, and on the opposite side the utilitarian ethical concern for all the beings endowed with the capacity for suffering and enjoyment – one might say that these short quotations contain in a nutshell the elements of the most enduring and pervasive thesis about the treatment of nonhumans in all Western culture. In short: animals, as mere means, have zero grade moral status – that is, they are excluded from the moral community. However, there are limits to what can be done to them. Such limits are dictated by the fact that our behavior towards animals can rebound upon our behavior towards the only true objects of moral concern, namely, other human beings.
We can recast such a view in more formal terms. At the center of ethics lies a set of norms to govern behavior towards (at least some) other entities. Asking which are the entities other than the agent that should have their interests protected, is tantamount to asking who is a moral patient. The moral patient is, i.e., a being whose treatment may be subject to direct moral evaluation. It is apparent that not all entities necessarily belong to this category – for most ethical theories, to shatter a stone or to mow the meadow’s grass are wholly irrelevant actions. What the view in question claims is that, just like stones and plants, nonhuman animals are not moral patients.
The boundaries of the class of moral patients have often changed in the course of history, and it also happened that many human beings were excluded from ethical consideration – Aristotle himself held that, like animals, human slaves too were mere means at their masters’ disposal. Today we can easily understand how unsatisfactory such an attitude was, because a long work of rational criticism has dismantled its justifications, revealing the true nature as an implicit appeal to prejudice of the high-sounding claims on behalf of the superiority of a sex to the other, or of one race to all the other races. But if we rightly regard such a critical process as a fundamental component of our moral evolution, a question spontaneously arises: if the justifications on behalf of intra-human discrimination turned out to be undefensible, isn’t it possible that the same holds for the justifications put forward on behalf of the discrimination against other-than-human beings? We shall here put to the test this hypothesis.
Read more: http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.2/cavalieri.htm