I remember in my first philosophy class that we were required to watch the film Earthlings, which is a propaganda piece on behalf of animal rights. I wrote a paper in response to it. I think that my previous conclusions are still right, but I wanted to take another jab at the topic.
Get up, Peter. Kill and eat. The permissibility of eating meat is explicitly taught in the New Testament. Christians thus ought to endeavor to understand and justify the practice.
Inviolable Rights?
Rights talk is difficult to track and somewhat ambiguous. Rights are, I think, inherently a social notion regulating how two moral beings interact with one another. Take an inviolable right to be one that may never be violated. Do such rights exist? I think so. What’s the ground for such rights? I think they lay primarily in personhood. In doing a wrong-act against another’s right, a perpetrator violates one of the victim’s legitimate moral claims.
It seems plausible to think that only persons have inviolable rights, and what makes a thing a person is the capacity to rationalize, to experience, and to have moral duties. John Finnis develops this thought in regards to the way in which humanity enjoys human goods--we enjoy it in a distinctly personal way.[1]
The Data Points
Here are two data points that seem to strongly imply that animals do not have inviolable rights.
The Intuition: It can, under appropriately dire circumstances, be permissible to kill and eat an animal. Imagine a starving child that has nothing available to eat but a nearby cow. The strong intuition of most of us is that it’s permissible to kill and eat the cow. But it’s never permissible, even in the starving case, to murder and eat another human.
If animals had an inviolable right to life, then we would need to prevent lions from killing gazelles, i.e., we would be obligated to prevent all forms of natural predation.
If these two points are correct, and I take it that most of us judge that they are correct, then animals do not have inviolable rights. It may be that a vegetarian believes that it’s only permissible to kill and eat an animal under *dire* circumstances; but this would still show that animals do not have an inviolable right to life. The debate then turns to what sort of circumstances can justify killing and eating an animal, in other words, it turns to a calculus.
The Calculus
If the debate turns to a calculus, then it is true that animals are deserving of moral consideration. It becomes a matter of trying to probe what sort of consideration and how far these considerations should go. The good that animal meat brings to humanity must be factored into the calculus: How it enriches our palate and brings diversity to our plates. The pain of animals in the process also seems like it should be taken into account. Does the pain of the animals outweigh the palate consideration? Perhaps not, especially so if we strive to eliminate the pain and suffering involved in the animal industry. It seems that we can kill and consume cows with virtually no pain at all. A person who advocates for the meat industry can take Temple Grandin’s methods to heart.
Neo-Cartesianism
It’s at this point that I want to mention a very unpopular idea with regards to animals to which I’m attracted, the Neo-Cartesian view. This view holds that animals do not have, or do not have in a relevant sense, the sort of conscious awareness that would make their pain deserving of moral consideration. Take the death of a deer in a forest fire. It just wouldn’t count as a good or a bad thing on this view, it’d just be a neutral event--more akin to me turning off my computer than to a human’s death. Many think that this hypothesis is far too speculative and unintuitive. But this isn’t necessarily so. We’re capable of researching pain as it manifests in physiology and neurobiology, and there have been suggestive experiments that show that pain can be felt under two distinct modes: (a) a perception that something in one’s body is in pain along with a perception of the intensity of the pain (b) a perception of the unpleasant nature of the pain. There are human subjects who, for various reasons, seem to suffer physical pain only in the sense of (a), who do not feel the “badness” of pain. These human subjects still react to pain stimuli, they still pull away from heat and so on. They just don’t experience its badness or its horror. The suggestion is that animals may only suffer such a pain as well, and that higher cognitive function would be required to suffer from (b). The further suggestion is that only pain of the (b) type would be worthy of moral consideration, while the pain of (a) type is not. There are some experiments involving rats in which they are spinalized and still seem to exhibit pain avoidance behavior, even *learned* pain avoidance behavior. This would seem to go some way towards showing that animals only experience pain of type (a).
The Intrinsic Tele
Here’s another speculative hypothesis, but one that has a very good chance of being correct given the truth of Christian theism: Some moral goods depend upon the constitution of the agent before they become goods. Education falls under good for a human, but not good for a cat. Photosynthesis falls under good for a plant but not good for a human. And so on.
With this understanding of species-relative goods in mind, consider the following scenario: Given a theistic metaphysic, there could be a range of possible creaturely natures present to God for him to create, with some such natures including among their goods photosynthesis, to grow in education and so on. Perhaps among those possible natures there’s also the good of serving the higher organisms. Now suppose that animals are created with a particular nature that has as a telos the pleasure given to humans when we eat them. In other words, God, in electing to create particular natures from the range of possibilities present to him, selected animal natures that are fulfilled when they serve mankind. For if it is not a telos of animals to be eaten by humans, then to kill an animal for human food, apart from special circumstances, is to do a harm to the animal--its death is contrary to its tele on this view--without proportionate reason. But if God has instantiated animal natures that do include such a tele, then it is literally a good for them to serve mankind.
One Further Argument
I’m not sure what to think of this argument. But for completion’s sake, here it is.
1. The axiom of morality requires the doing of good and avoidance of evil.
2. Inviolable moral rights exist to protect individuals in pursuit of this axiom.
3. There are certain requirements needed in order to pursue the axiom in the relevant moral sense.
4. Animals do not meet these requirements.
C1. Animals do not pursue the axiom. (From 3 and 4)
C2. Animals do not have moral rights. (From 2 and C1)
Premise 2 is the central premise and premise 3 requires some flesh. Here’s some measure of justification for premise (2.): “Rights exist because we are obliged to guard the moral value of our being and fulfill our function by voluntary observance of the moral law. To this kind of action rights are essential, because we must be guaranteed immunity from hindrance in our choice of the necessary means.” And here’s the closest I’ll get to fleshing out (3.)’s “requirements”: rationality, intent, and some sense of free-will.
This is an ought-to-ought argument. Persons ought to obey morality and pursue the goods in a moral way. This personal ought of individual agents transfers to those in the community--others ought, societally, not interfere with the individual’s ought. But animals do not have a moral ought. Having the possession of a moral ought requires rather strong intent, rationality, and free-will. Animals do not possess these sufficiently, they just do what they in fact do. So animals do not possess a personal individual ought in any of their behavior, so there is no ought of theirs to be transferred.
The question becomes whether this personal individual ought-protection is a plausible grounds for our talk of rights. Perhaps the ability to feel pain is instead that which grounds some rights, specifically the right to not feel pain. But maybe that’d be best classified under some other moral category other than rights, perhaps falling under some more generic “due moral consideration” category.
[1.] So while there are clearly good and bad states of affairs for an animal, these states lack the distinctive personal dimension. And it’s this personal dimension that transforms these goods into rights.
One animal rights proponent holds that since animals can participate in goods that it follows that they have rights. But poison ivy can clearly participate in goods; it can flourish and have proper amounts of sun and water, or it can wither and die. Yet it presumably does not possess a right to these things. It’s the ‘personal’ element of our enjoyment of goods that generates our rights.
No comments:
Post a Comment