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A Defense of Animal Rights

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Abstract

I argue that animals have rights in the sense of having valid claims, which might turn out to be actual rights as society advances and new scientific-technological developments facilitate finding alternative ways of satisfying our vital interests without using animals. Animals have a right to life, to liberty in the sense of freedom of movement and communication, to subsistence, to relief from suffering, and to security against attacks on their physical existence. Animals’ interest in living, freedom, subsistence, and security are of vital importance to them, and they do not belong to us; they are not the things we have already possessed by virtue of our own nature.

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Notes

  1. After Singer’s provocative description of physical conditions of animals in farms and in scientific laboratories, many scholars followed him in drawing our attention to how animals are being treated in laboratories and in other places created for animals by human beings. Francione’s keen observations on human treatment of animals are worth mentioning here (2004; 110).

  2. By “speciesism” I mean the idea that interests of members of a species have superior moral value just because they are members of that species.

  3. Swart quite appropriately draws our attention to the difference between wild and domesticated animals, claiming that "natural functioning" should be taken into consideration in the evaluation of suffering from wild animal experimentation (2004: 1181–187).

  4. Bovenkerk et al. (2003: 13–26), for example, argue for taking ill wild animals out of their natural habitat temporarily in order to cure them.

  5. We see the origin of the idea of rights as valid claims in Mill’s writings: “When we call anything a person’s right, we mean that he has a valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it; either by the force of law or by that of education and opinion. If he has what we consider a sufficient claim, on whatever account, to have something guaranteed to him by society, we say that he has a right to it.” (1979: 119–127).

  6. I agree also with Haynes in his view that we can “construct consent” for the mentally retarded or human infants as to whether they should undergo a risky treatment to relieve them from a serious illness (2008: 119–127).

  7. Many defenders of animal rights contend that a great part of biomedical experiments conducted on animals has indeed no significant contribution to human health. Greek and Greek (2000: 18; 2002), for instance, argue that there are differences between humans and nonhuman animals with respect to their neurobiological structures, their treatment responses, and so on. This renders most of the current research on animals useless for humans, according to them. Advocates of biomedical researches, on the other hand, point out that most medical experiments done on animals have an important positive impact on the treatment of human diseases. They also emphasize good physical conditions such as air-conditioning rooms in which laboratory animals live and their advantage of being protected from predators. See Fox (1986) and Dresser (1988: 123–143). Notice that the recognition of basic rights of animals would have a significant effect on the reduction of the number of biomedical experiments on nonhuman animals. In that case, biomedical research on animals would be permissible if it is highly likely that the result of the research would serve to protect some human interests, which are comparably more significant than animals’ rights overridden for the sake of the research.

  8. Here I follow Feinberg’s usage of “natural rights” in the sense of “critical moral rights.” Though I believe that moral rights cover a wider spectrum of rights than natural rights, I shall not dwell upon the distinction between the two in detail due to the limited scope of the paper.

  9. Quoted by Waldron (1987: 37).

  10. Feinberg’s example of the sexual mutilation of a young girl nicely illustrates why moral rights are not simply fictitious entities posed by some philosophers: “The sexual mutilation of a young girl with unsterilized razor blades is a wrong to her. It is also true that it ought not to be permitted by law or by convention, but what we condemn here and now is not merely that the law does not prohibit it, but that it is done at all. The girl in our example would be wronged whether the act that wrongs her is legal or not.” See Feinberg (1992: 158).

  11. Similarly, for a will theory of rights see Wellman (1985: 91–94).

  12. This means that though humans might benefit from animals’ products, they cannot kill animals for food as this would be a violation of their basic right to life.

  13. We cannot say the same thing for children for several reasons, all of which can hardly be discussed fully within the scope of this paper. But it should be noted that parents of children are directly responsible for their birth or coming into existence and this fact creates the responsibility of caring for them without any corresponding expectation such as a claim to the products of their labor at least during their childhood.

  14. Admittedly, animals can be trained to act in ways they are taught, which can easily be observed in the case of domesticated animals or animals in zoos and circuses. However, within the context of wild nature, it would not be wrong to say that animals often behave out of their instincts.

  15. The claim that animals behave out of necessity in “their predetermined jungle” might be reckoned skeptically, especially in the face of results of recent scientific research in the field of animal ethology. The experimental findings of researchers like Bekoff and Savage-Rumbaugh, for example, suggest that there is no definite division between humans and nonhuman animals. Bekoff (2000: 861–870) yields evidence on the basis of observations on animals’ moral feelings such as shame, embarrassment, resentment, compassion, respect and so on while Savage-Rumbaugh et al. (2000: 910–921) argue that some mammals like chimps and bonobos are capable of understanding human speech and using a lexical communicative system. It should be noted, however, that the experimental findings are still far from conclusively proving that there are no relevant differences between humans and nonhuman animals with respect to their moral behaviors. Indeed, there is some evidence that implies a “sharp discontinuity” between “great apes and all other animals.” See e.g., Byrne (1995: 144–172). Those who appeal to the Darwinian notion of evolution to indicate the difference between humans and animals merely as a matter of degree should also consider mutations taking place in nature during the course of evolution. The discontinuity between great apes and other animals suggests that we should avoid making bold species-general claims and that few experimental findings on chimps and bonobos are inadequate to justify the claim that differences between humans and animals are merely a matter of degree rather than a matter of kind.

  16. Likewise, Jamieson states that rights are closely related to capacities: “Only creatures who can practice religion,” he notes, “have rights to practice religion and only creatures who can fly have rights to fly.” (2008: 182).

  17. It is beyond the scope of this paper, but I believe that the latter’s right to life might also be defended though on different grounds than those offered for wild animals in this paper.

  18. I shall not dwell upon the problems the overpopulation of a species creates in wild nature due to the limited space here. Note, however, that a disproportionate increase in the population of a species is a threat not only to other species and environment but also to the members of that species themselves. To prevent the violation of the rights of members of other species and to protect the stability of environment, at a minimum level interference such as the sterilization of individuals of the overpopulated species might be permitted.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this paper for their helpful comments.

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Correspondence to Aysel Dog˘an.

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Dog˘an, A. A Defense of Animal Rights. J Agric Environ Ethics 24, 473–491 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-010-9273-3

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