selections from an essay from envirolink titled,"beyond might makes right", about animal rights and ethics.


The reason given most often for claiming that other animals should not have rights is that they are not human. However, "human" is only an arbitrary label without any moral relevance in and of itself.
In the past, the term "human" was used to refer only to light-skinned people of European descent. Given that the definition of "human" can change, one cannot simply say that an individual has rights because that individual is "human" while another individual has no rights because that individual is not "human."

Differences in degree
Many say that humans deserve rights while other beings do not because humans have a greater level of certain characteristics than other animals: humans are more intelligent, creative, aware, technologically advanced, dominant, able to use language, able to enter into contracts, able to make moral choices, etc. Thus, humans deserve rights because they have a greater degree of these characteristics.
This argument of degrees has two problems:
Instead of thinking that rights are granted to an entire group, a more accurate view of rights is that they are granted to individuals, because it is individuals, not groups, who are capable of suffering and dying. To say, "all individuals in the group `human' have the right not to be killed" has meaning, but to say "the group `human' has the right not to be killed" has no meaning.
Not all humans possess these characteristics to a greater degree than all other non-humans. There are non- humans who are more intelligent, creative, aware, dominant, technologically advanced (in reference to tool making), and able to use language, than some humans; many animals are at least equal to many humans in their ability to enter into contracts or act morally. Examples would be a chimpanzee compared to a human infant or a severely mentally handicapped person. If rights were granted at a certain level of a characteristic such as those listed, the more intelligent (creative, etc.) animals would have rights while the less intelligent (creative, etc.) humans would not.
Despite this, many people believe that all humans, regardless of their relative level of intelligence, creativity, etc. should have rights, while other animals should not. These people try to include all humans while excluding all other animals in one of several ways.

Potential characteristics
Some say the humans who are surpassed by some animals in a certain characteristic have rights because they have a greater potential for these characteristics than do other animals.
Again, this argument is not true of all humans. For example, humans who have had portions of their brains irreparably destroyed, although still able to function to a degree, have no potential for obtaining the intelligence level of a chimpanzee. Yet most people would say that an injury or disease which causes brain damage does not rob that individual of their rights.

Value to others
Another rationale is that even though infants cannot enter into moral contracts, they should be granted rights because they are valued by other humans (their parents, for instance) who can enter into contracts. By this argument, infants themselves do not possess any inherent rights, but receive them only if valued by an adult human.
At the same time, being valued by an adult human does not grant rights to pigs, parakeets, pet rocks, or Porsches. This is inconsistent: either one is granted rights by being valued by an adult human, and thus everything valued by an adult human has rights, or there must be a different criteria for granting rights.
People who believe that rights are granted to infants because of their value to an adult human would have to admit that infants who are not valued by other humans could be used in medical research. Indeed, this would be morally imperative in order to benefit infants who are valued by others. Most people would contend, however, that even unvalued orphans have rights. Therefore, rights must be based on other criteria.

Biological rights
If only individuals of the group now defined as "human" have rights regardless of their level of certain characteristics, on what basis are chimpanzees, pigs, elephants, dogs, cats, etc., excluded from the group to which all humans belong?
One answer is that humans have rights because they belong to the species Homo Sapiens. In other words, a chimpanzee may very well be as intelligent (or creative, etc.) as some humans, but chimpanzees do not have rights because they are not members of the biologically defined rights-bearing species, Homo Sapiens.
Supposing that it is possible to come up with a genetic definition of Homo Sapiens that includes most individuals our society currently considers "human" and excludes all individuals our society currently does not consider "human," the questions then become:
Why should rights be deserved solely on the basis of a certain sequence of genes?
If rights should be based on genes, why should the line be drawn at the species level? And why at Homo Sapiens? Why shouldn't the line be drawn at race, order, phylum, or kingdom?
Among the genes that determine one's eye color, etc., which gene is it that confers rights?
A thoughtful person might find having their rights (or lack thereof) determined by a sequence of molecules to be a bit absurd. It is no better than basing rights on the pigmentation of one's skin (which is also determined by the individual's genetic code).

The law
Some would argue that while infants and the mentally handicapped deserve rights, other animals don't because the current law grants legal rights to infants and the mentally handicapped. However, these people are ignoring the fact that whoever has legal rights is determined merely by the opinion of today's legislators. The law changes as people's opinions or political motivations change. Politicians decide who they think should have rights and make laws accordingly, not vice-versa. Though the law changes over time, the moral status of beings - whether a being has inherent rights, such as the right to non-exploitation - does not. For example, minorities in the United States did not change when the law decided to include them.

Ability to understand abstract concepts
It has been argued that non-humans do not deserve rights because they cannot understand abstract concepts. An example is the contention that pigs do not understand death, so there is no moral reason not to take a pig's life. Anyone who has observed pigs in a slaughterhouse would find it difficult not to conclude that pigs understand death to the extent that they are in great terror when confronted with it. Indeed, most animals act as though they have a functional idea of what death is. They fight to stay alive and can tell when another of their own is dead. What more do humans know about death that is morally relevant? Indeed, many animals have a greater grasp of death, self-preservation, and other concepts than do infants and the mentally impaired.

The Golden Rule
In the past, humans may have respected each other's rights in order to survive without constant violence, and many people still function on this level. Yet over time, the more civilized people have evolved a moral system that grants rights based not just on self-protection, but on the Golden Rule - treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated. We know that we want to stay alive, do not wish to suffer, etc., and we assume others like us have the same desires. Being capable of looking beyond our own individual interests, we apply the Golden Rule even to people who could not harm us.
How much like us does a being have to be before we include them under the Golden Rule? At one time, women were not enough like the men who held power to be granted many rights. Neither were minorities in the United States and other societies. Even though the circle has expanded to include these individuals in the United States, today other animals are still not considered sufficiently like us for the majority of people to treat these animals our neighbors under the Golden Rule.

If they looked like us ...
Searching for some characteristic to justify granting all humans rights while denying rights to all other animals is futile. A moral system based on any of the characteristics discussed so far would either include many species of non-human animals or exclude infants and some mentally handicapped.
While the term "human" seems defining, and is even used here for the convenience of easy communication, it is an ambiguous, morally meaningless label. The question remains: where does one draw the line? A difference of appearance is a matter of degree as well as ethically irrelevant - outward physical attributes have no relationship to whether a being or object should be granted rights or could even appreciate them. A human-looking mannequin has no more need or desire for rights than a rock or a log. However, as when race was the dividing line for rights, the dividing line for most people is still looks - if the animals we eat and use in experimentation looked like us, they would be granted rights and protected from exploitation.

Suffering
To have a consistent moral philosophy, a characteristic must be found that not only allows for the inclusion of all humans, but also distinguishes between a wax dummy and an infant. This rights-granting characteristic must be morally relevant. The only characteristic that simply and consistently meets these requirements is the capacity for suffering.
As Jeremy Bentham, head of the Department of Jurisprudence at Oxford University during the 19th Century said in reference to his belief that animals should be granted rights, "The question is not, `Can they reason?' nor, `Can they talk?' But rather, `Can they suffer?'"
If a being cannot suffer, then it does not matter to that being what happens to it. For example, some computers have an intelligence (in some ways greater than any human), but these machines do not care whether they are turned off, harmed, or even destroyed.
On the other hand, if a being is sentient - able to experience pleasure and pain - then it does matter to that being what happens to it. Irrespective of intelligence, language, etc., a sentient being has interests in its existence - at the least, to avoid pain and to stay alive - and any complete moral philosophy cannot ignore these concerns.

Animals don't feel pain
Historically, many philosophers and scientists ended any discussion of ethics and animals by stating that animals cannot feel pain. That this idea is still held by people today is what prompted noted scientist and Pulitzer-prize winner, Dr. Carl Sagan, along with Dr. Ann Druyan, to write in their book, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:
Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending that animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and `animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.
It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
The nervous systems of all vertebrate animals, including humans, operate in the same manner. All these animals are capable of feeling pain and fear, which has led many researchers to use other animals in "pain research." Indeed, most people understand that animals are capable of suffering, and oppose inflicting "unnecessary" suffering on them.
Other animals also have an active desire to live, and the act of depriving them of life or freedom is harming them in many of the same ways a human is harmed when deprived of life or freedom. Animals show us they value their lives and that they want to stay alive by their struggles against adversity, threats, and slaughter. While some animals do not always make the best decisions in order to stay alive, and some even appear to commit suicide, the same can be said of some humans to whom we grant rights.
There are those who still believe that there is no evidence that animals value their lives because they have not said so in English or another human language. These people must admit, however, that the same is true of human infants.
Some would say having a God-given soul is what gives one rights. However, like the label "human," those in power have historically denied souls to women and other groups of individuals. Even if God did grant souls to humans while not to other animals, the animals have the capacity to feel pain and the desire to live. It would require a cruel God to create beings with these capacities whose only purpose was to suffer at the hands of humans. As Nobel Laureate Romain Rolland has written:
To one whose mind is free, there is something more intolerable in the suffering of animals then in the suffering of men. For with the latter, it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. It cries vengeance upon all the human race. If God exists and tolerates it, it cries vengeance upon God. If there exists a good God, then even the most humble of living things must be saved. If God is good only to the strong, if there is no justice for the weak and lowly, for the poor creatures who are offered up as a sacrifice to humanity, then there is no such thing as goodness, no such thing as justice....

Secularist's faith
While many people grant rights to some beings and not to others based only on the majority interpretation of their individual religious doctrine, secularists who accept that all humans have rights yet reject the idea that any non- human animals have rights must also be basing their moral code on faith. As there is no objective criteria for discriminating all humans from all other animals, these secularists must believe in an intangible, unmeasurable, and undefinable "humanness" that somehow confers rights.

Eskimos
Some contend that since some people, such as Eskimos, must kill animals to survive, killing animals is acceptable. This excuse raises the hypothetical question of if Eskimos, or another group, "had" to kill other Homo Sapiens to survive, would it be morally acceptable to deny rights to Homo Sapiens?
Even if Eskimos would starve to death if they did not kill other animals, that is not the case for people in our society who kill and eat animals out of habit and taste. In today's world, eating animals is not a case of survival.
Furthermore, if everyone were to base their actions and morality on what Eskimos do, then vivisection and factory farming would have to be abolished, since the Eskimos do neither. Each one of us could no longer pay someone to raise and murder animals to satisfy our taste for flesh, but would instead have to hunt and kill for our own meals.

Even though rights can only be granted consistently and justly on the basis of the capacity to suffer and not on the ability to make moral choices, there is ample evidence that many animals can and do make moral choices, often to the shame of rights-bearing and "superior" humans. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, in their book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, relate the following:
In the annals of primate ethics, there are some accounts that have the ring of parable. In a laboratory setting, macaques were fed if they were willing to pull a chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. Otherwise, they starved.
After learning the ropes, the monkeys frequently refused to pull the chain; in one experiment only 13% would do so - 87% preferred to go hungry. One macaque went without food for nearly two weeks rather than hurt its fellow. Macaques who had themselves been shocked in previous experiments were even less willing to pull the chain. The relative social status or gender of the macaques had little bearing on their reluctance to hurt others.
If asked to choose between the human experimenters offering the macaques this Faustian bargain and the macaques themselves - suffering from real hunger rather than causing pain to others - our own moral sympathies do not lie with the scientists. But their experiments permit us to glimpse in non-humans a saintly willingness to make sacrifices in order to save others - even those who are not close kin. By conventional human standards, these macaques - who have never gone to Sunday school, never heard of the Ten Commandments, never squirmed through a single junior high school civics lesson - seem exemplary in their moral grounding and their courageous resistance to evil. Among these macaques, at least in this case, heroism is the norm. If the circumstances were reversed, and captive humans were offered the same deal by macaque scientists, would we do as well? (Especially when there is an authority figure urging us to administer the electric shocks, we humans are disturbingly willing to cause pain - and for a reward much more paltry than food is for a starving macaque [cf. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental Overview].) In human history there are a precious few whose memory we revere because they knowingly sacrificed themselves for others. For each of them, there are multitudes who did nothing.
If animals can feel pain as humans can, and desire to live as humans do, how can they not be granted similar respect? As moral beings, how can we justify our continued exploitation of them? We must stand up against the idea that might makes right. We must question the status quo which allows the unquestioned infliction of so much suffering. We must act from our own ethics, rather than blindly follow what we are told.
Discussing the macaque monkeys who chose to starve rather than inflict pain on another, Drs. Sagan and Druyan conclude, "Might we have a more optimistic view of the human future if we were sure our ethics were up to their standards?"

thanks to envirolink...

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